Are You Making These Common Small Business Marketing Mistakes? (Part 3)

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Not Making The Most of a Powerful Guarantee

This mini-article is one of a series aimed at helping you avoid common small business advertising mistakes. Many small businesses don’t have a strong guarantee, or they don’t know how to incorporate their guarantee into their ads. This is important, because powerful guarantees have been shown to increase ad response by 50+ percent.

Gurantees work because they remove the risk of purchase from your customer, making it easier for them to buy. When you guarantee your product or service, you’re showing confidence that it will produce the result you claim – customers respond to that.

Here are a few tips for successfully incorporating your guarantee into your ads:

1. Your guarantee should be a specific promise of performance or results.

Don’t use boilerplate phrases like “Satisfaction Guaranteed” or even “Money-Back Guaranteed”. While these are probably better than nothing, they don’t have a fraction of the effect of a specific promise like:

“Be thrilled with your treatment or we’ll pay you to go to the competition”

” Enjoy a minimum 50% increase in website traffic within 60 days or your money back”

“Send $35 to [Your Company Name and Address]. $40 refund if you’re not completely satisfied.”

2. Test Your Guarantee

In my work as a small business marketing consultant and copywriter, I often work with clients to develop a powerful guarantee. Sometimes the business owners are hesitant – what will happen if customers try to take advantage of a money-back offer? The simple answer to this is to test. Test small at first (one ad with the guarantee, versus one ad without). Keep track of the difference in sales results and any returns or refund requests. If it works, keep doing it!

I’ve always found that a strong guarantee generates more than enough additional sales to cover any returns or refund requests.

Also test different aspects of your guarantee (e.g. wording, time period, conditions etc.) The difference in sales generated by a 30 day and 60 day guarantee can be significant.

3. Make your guarantee highly visible

If you have a strong guarantee, don’t hide it away where it won’t be seen. Strong guarantees make great headlines. Visual devices such as a “Money-Back Guarantee” rosette also work well – but remember to enlarge on your guarantee statement.

What powerful guarantee can you offer your prospects to make it easier for them to do business with you?

If you haven’t already subscribed to our free marketing newsletter “Results-Driven Marketing Secrets” newsletter, sign up now so you can start implementing effective low-cost and no-cost marketing strategies in your business. Subscribe here…

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How To Write Eye-Grabbing Headlines That Catapult Your Prospects Into Your Ads

Just taking a break from the “advertising mistakes” mini-article series because I had to write a little something about headlines – without a doubt, the most important aspect of your ads.

A great ad with the wrong headline can bomb, whereas a great headline on an average ad will probably do quite well. Let’s take a look at a few techniques for coming up with sales-boosting headlines.

First things first: Avoid these proven sales-killing “headlines” like the pox

1. Your company name

2. A generic industry or service category (e.g. “Plumbing Contractor”)

3. Or on a website or brochure, “Welcome to ABC Industries”

The points above sound basic (and they are), but it’s surprising how many ads and websites make those mistakes.

OK, so how do you create great selling headlines that practically catapult your readers into your ad? Here are a few tips…

1. Call out to your target audience. If your message is aimed at stockbrokers, mention “stockbrokers” in the headline.

2. Mention specific benefits. Face it – consumers are jaded. We all are. Heck, I can hardly get out of bed in the morning General statements like “Lose weight fast” or “Save Money on ” are no longer effective. Specific numbers and images evoke much more potent images in your prospects’ minds than generalities. That’s why they sell much better.

3. Use vivid, action-oriented verbs. Especially online, high-energy headlines work very well.

Here’s a headline that uses all 3 of the above techniques…

“New Software Boosts Stockbrokers’ Income by 34, 43, even 125% – by Slashing Time Spent Chasing “Dead” Accounts and Lazer-Focusing Your Energies on the Big Players”

OK, it needs a bit of work, but you get the idea. Onward.

4. Use “cognitive dissonance”. That’s a fancy way of saying, make your audience curious. Here’s a headline we’re testing for a client that sells custom bumper stickers:

“Do You Wonder How We Can Sell Full-Color Stickers At A 1-Color Price, with FREE Artwork?”

This type of headline makes people curious – they feel compelled to find the answer and relieve a sense of “dissonance” with this apparent paradox.

5. Include some challenging or surprising information. Here’s another headline that I wrote for a rubbish removal firm’s website…

“Fast, Professional Rubbish Removal, Sydney-wide…We’ll Pay You $1 Per Minute In Cash If We’re Late!”

The “hook” is the guarantee. Also bear in mind that most of the people who see this headline will have already searched for the term “rubbish removal sydney” or similar…That may influence the content of the headline, compared with say a newspaper headline that is designed to appeal to only a few prospects from a large number of readers.

If you haven’t already subscribed to the free monthly “Results-Driven Marketing Secrets” newsletter, sign up now so you can start implementing effective low-cost and no-cost marketing strategies in your business. Subscribe here…

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Are You Making These Common Small Business Advertising Mistakes? (Part 2)

In my last mini-article, I mentioned how many small business ads read more like a shopping list than the benefit-rich, call to action that a good ad should be.

Another very common mistake or oversight that 99% of small businesses are making right now is…

Failing to Test and Track Ad Response

Why should you test and track different ads? Because one ad, sales letter or web page may sell 2, 3 even 21 TIMES more than an alternative for exactly the same product or service. You need to know what’s working and what isn’t so you can cut the losers and optimize the winners.

How to Track Advertising Response

Tracking advertising response is as easy as asking callers where they heard about your company. As you publish more ads and test one ad against another, you’ll need to get a little more sophisticated with your tracking by implementing one or more of the following…

Coded coupons in your ads
Different coloured reply-paid postcards
Different department numbers
Asking your callers to mention an offer or ask for someone by name
etc.

Online it’s even easier – there are lots of great tracking software programs that will allow you to compare one page against another or one traffic source against another. We use and recommend ProAnalyzer Tracking Software to do this, but there are other good programs out there as well.

When one of my marketing consulting clients started tracking their ads a while back, they found that $500 newspaper ads were generating almost zero response, while cheap flyers were bringing in loads of customers. So they were able to save a bundle on ineffective advertising.

What To Test

You should test these things in your ads:

Headlines
Offers
Body Copy
Guarantee
Price

Hint: You’ll get the greatest return by testing headlines first.

When you find something that works, stay with it until you find something better. It really isn’t hard to improve your marketing ROI if you use this approach, yet hardly anyone does it! If YOU decide to take action on this tip, you can save money, leverage your marketing budget, and put some distance between you and your competition.

Simply making your ads sell harder can boost your business massively – start by testing and tracking your ads, and consider hiring a good copywriter – a small investment in professionally written copy will makes your advertising dollars work much harder.

If you haven’t already subscribed to the free monthly “Results-Driven Marketing Secrets” newsletter, sign up now so you can start implementing effective low-cost and no-cost marketing strategies in your business. Subscribe here…

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Are You Making These Common Small Business Advertising Mistakes? (Part 1)

In my work as a copywriter, clients sometimes ask me to review their ads to help them improve their sales results. In this series of mini-articles, I’ll talk about some of the most common small business advertising mistakes, so you can troubleshoot your advertising and get a better Return On Investment (ROI) from your marketing.

Layout

Too many small business ads read like a list:

Company name at the top (where there should be a benefit-rich headline).
Dry, egotistical copy in the middle.
No clear or compelling offer.
Phone number and address at the bottom.

That layout will kill your sales right there, because your prospect doesn’t care about your company name (or a cute headline). He or she only wishes to know: “What’s in it for me?”

Here’s a better layout for selling that works well in almost any situation:

Headline at the top. (Don’t be tricky: just state the strongest benefit of your product or service.)

Coupon or contact number at bottom right (called the “anchor point” of the ad).

Company name and address at bottom left (where the prospect will find it once they’re convinced.)

Put headlines under photos or illustrations, so the reader’s eye goes from photo -> headline -> copy in that logical order. (Illustration layouts also depend on the size and concept of the ad)

A series of benefit-rich bullet points (long copy is also great, but much more difficult to write.)

How are your ads? Do they read like a shopping list, or a compelling story ending with a call to action? If the former, I know you’ll get great results from changing your formats.

If you haven’t already subscribed to the free monthly “Results-Driven Marketing Secrets” newsletter, sign up now so you can start implementing effective low-cost and no-cost marketing strategies in your business. Subscribe here…

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Welcome…

Welcome to the “Results-Driven Marketing Blog”. My hope is that this Blog will act as an idea generator and stimulator for small business owners and managers who are interested in growing their business. I’ll be sharing insights, vignettes, case studies, musings and thought-provoking questions from my work as a copywriter and marketing consultant.

But first, a little about myself: My name is Will Swayne. I’m the Managing Director of Will International Pty Ltd, a marketing consultancy based in Brisbane, Australia. Among other things, we publish a free marketing newsletter at www.Marketing-Results.com.au

My marketing background is firmly rooted in the results-oriented world of direct marketing. My first marketing job was with a Japanese marketing company by the name of JIMOS Corporation, as they went from US$3 mil to US$70 mil in sales in less than 5 years. That was a great chance to be involved in planning together hundreds of offers and campaigns, and seeing what worked and what didn’t.

After returning to Australia in late 2002, I set up my company with the goal of transferring the effective techniques of direct marketing to small and medium businesses.

Now we help clients gain a higher return on investment from their advertising and marketing activities.

With that intro out of the way, from now on this blog will take the form of mini articles and discussions. I hope you find something of value here.

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